Part VI

Ingwenya 4-25

There’s a guy in the hall blasting a fog horn in brief intervals.

“Meeting, T-Willy at 6! Meeting!” I think I’ll have to go to it. They say it’ll only last for fifteen minutes, but this by the African standard, which is unreliable as anything.

Tebogo and I were together as we usually are, coincidentally, in the TV room, passing the time with whoever happens to be there, which often happens to be ourselves, watching MTV and when that gets boring, African Idol, the local spin-off of the American original music show.

“So where are you going for this weekend?” he asked me.

“I told you, I’m not going anywhere.”

“Ah, eta, but you said you would.”

“Just now? I said if someone said, he come, with us, we are going somewhere for this weekend, I would. But no one has. Besides, it’s only three days.” The Idols show had been running for a few weeks now. Whatever network that had started it up was making a killing on it. Auditions from people who didn’t know how to sing but thought they were a godsend to the music industry anyway had an apparent universal appeal, and they played it again and again, repeats from Botswana, and Malawi, with previews for the next stage, the next cut, in between shots of the judges hysterias. On another channel they were broadcasting every single audition, unedited, in a row.

“I tell you, Howard is boring,” he said. “It’s Friday, but it doesn’t even feel like Friday. It could be Wednesday. People here are depressed; they just work all the time. This is why you sleep in the day, mfueto, because there is nothing to do.”

He told me he was going to Jubilee, the little shop with the broken pool table on campus where the guys who don't have girlfriends typically get their dinner. “Do you know ingwenya?” he asked. I didn’t. “Come, I’ll show you.”

We went to Jubes, got in line. SABC1 was playing on the TV. The ingwenyas were still frying, the counter lady said. It would be five more minutes. We sat at a table and shoved asidesome Styrofoam containers already there .

“Tell me, mfueto, Zambia. How much did you spend?” I guessed wildly and shot him a number.

“That’s it?” he said, “for everything?” His inqury ringed less surprise and more a desire to be certain. He wanted to know that this was possible on the budget that I told him it was. So I refined my numbers, guessed a little higher, and said something else, trying harder to be as accurate as I could, with a margin of error.

“You know, there’s a bus you can take, from Johannesburg all the way to Livingstone,” I told him.

“Livingstone. Where is that?”

“In Zambia, at the border between Botswana and Zimbabwe. I came through Botswana but you can go through Zimbabwe direct. It would cost less, though I went to Zimbabwe as well when I was there. I might go back in June; a few people have invited me.”

“You know, I might as well,” he said. I was surprised. “Yeah, that guy I showed you last night, with the bag, he is going back home at the end of the semester, and he asked me to come.” The guy he was referring to was a Zimbabwean, from Harare. Tebogo had known him for some time but he found him the previous night carrying around a bag full of Zimbabwean notes, many of them already expired. When Hayden and I were in the kitchen, he came back with handfuls of bills for 10 and 5 thousand Zimbabwean dollars. We did the math together and it came out to a few thousandths of an American cent by that week’s exchange rate. It was a good laugh. Tebogo continued. “You know, you got me thinking, mfueto. I have been in this country all my life and I’ve not been around to see the ones neighboring it. So I might go, we’ll see.”

Five minutes passed and our ingwenyas were ready. “How much?” I asked my friend.

“1.70.” he grinned a little, like even he couldn’t believe that it was so cheap. I gave him exact change – a one rand coin, a fifty cent piece, a ten, and a couple of fives that I’d found on the ground in the days before and were looking to unload.

“Come on, man, I can’t take this,” he said.

“These things, they are responsible for the holes in your wallet. Maybe they are worth more in Zimbabwe but to me they are nothing.” I gave him a two rand coin and called it even. He passed the money through some metal bars and the lady produced two steaming balls of crispy dough. I had seen these things before, in Cape Town, I realized. They were bigger there, though I suppose what constitutes a sizable ball of dough depends on whose frying it.

We stepped outside, and he ripped the bag in two and gave me a ball. “What are these called again?” I asked him.

“Ingwenya,” he said. I had to repeat it a few times before getting it right. I had to hold it my shirt because it was too hot for my hands. We started walking back towards res. “Some guys, they have two, for the day. That’s it.” I couldn’t believe it.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah, yeah. And sometimes, a guy will come to Jubes in the morning, buy his two ingwenya, eat one and not eat the other till tomorrow.” Talk about pinching pennies: refusing to spend more than 25 US Cents for all meals in a day. For me it was a snack, a trip to the store to pass the time and learn something new about life in this country. But I couldn't get more than a literal taste of what this fried ball of dough meant to people. The real experience would have been to eat nothing else that day, and one more and nothing else the next day. “You see, this is why you guys are usually taller than us, because you get more nutrients than we do," Tebogo said, chomping into his bit and passing ahead of me for the staircase to the gate.

Poverty was such an abstract thing for most of the exchange students. There were places you could see it in Durban, of course. Taking a bus to the Westville campus passed squatter settlements for almost half the time. But walking around campus, it was easy to relegate those thoughts to another place, another world, as far from the here and now as it was at home. But people were that poor. There were students at Howard who had grown up in settlements like those and in villages not much richer, and from day to day they still lived like that. Eating that ball of dough, it was unsurprising that there were riots at the start of this semester, but that seemed like long ago now.

Looking ahead, I hadn’t really considered how short Tebogo was, either.

Blackout 4-28

Load sharing is rarely a pleasant experience. I was in the LAN today when it happened, at 1PM, writing a letter with a mouse with a busted left button. It was frustrating as it was until the air con and the lights went out simultaneously. Some sort of battery backup in the place kept the machines running for a little bit, at least long enough to save my work and check my email one last time, but it wouldn’t be long before the heat started to build, and then the computers all went out simultaneously and there’d be a line for the door. I left prematurely, came back, grabbed a notebook and a pen, my copy of Herzog by Saul Bellow and started walking to Davenport Road, to find a coffee shop and wait out the darkness. They had published a schedule for our share of the sharing to be done, but today they hadn’t followed it. Maybe it was because of the holiday – Freedom Day, the anniversary of the 1994 elections which brought Mandela and the ANC into power. They figured more people would be at home so it was best to cut the lights in the day, and not at night, when they usually do. Even so, I had no idea how long it would last. When I came back, more than three hours later, the lights were still out, and it was getting dark.

I sat in my room and read with my book on the window sill for a while, but I was tiring of it after twenty minutes. I went to the TV lounge, where the largest windows were. It was silent as anything. Usually the place was filled with people, but then, with the lights and the cable out, only the roomless squatter from Pretoria, Tebogo was sitting there in the dim light, looking over some notes for class.

“It’s been a while, hasn’t it?” I said.

“Damn, man. Four hours. I can’t believe it.”

I sat on the window sill and stared out onto the street. In the distance you could see the city skyline, and just beyond it, the first signs of a sunset on the horizon: a narrow stripe of golden light sitting snug between the blue sky and the grey mass of buildings, echoing what was surely a far grander scene on the Western edge behind us. I couldn’t tell if it was raining or not. It had been off and on all day, never more than something above a mist. Just then the ground was wet, and you could hear the sound of water droplets hitting the pavement, but it could’ve just been the runoff from the trees as well.

“Hey, Alex. I have to ask you for a favor,” Tebogo said. “This guy, he was supposed to pay me some money. He said he was going to today, but he called me and said the banks were all closed, because of the holiday, so he says he can’t. First thing in the morning, mfueto – ”

“Yeah, yeah, just tell me, what do you need?” I asked.

“Twenty rand.” He said it like it was a minor tangent to his story before continuing again. “The thing is, this guy was supposed to pay me like two days ago, mfueto, but I don’t know what happened … it’s shame man, shame ...” The last time Tebogo asked to borrow money he said he’d pay me back first thing in the morning. That was in the afternoon, and the next day, at 7AM, he knocked on my door, woke me up, and, when I answered the door, he dropped a two rand coin in my hand without a word and walked away, as if he’d never spent it at all.

I pulled out my wallet and took out two twenty rand notes and passed it to him, one behind the other. He pulled one back and saw the second, and a look of astonishment passed over his face.

“First thing in the morning, mfueto, I tell you.”

“Just give me twenty back; you can keep the rest.”

“You’re sure? Eta! You are Nkoko. Do you what that means? It means you are the man, Nkoko.” He laughed, almost mischievously, like he’d just made a killing with a hand of cards and now we were rich together.
…

We went to the kitchen where the light was a little brighter because the equally big windows and now also the glass paneled doors faced West. I stood out on the balcony. It was so quiet. Normally there was music blasting from all angles, and the sounds of a whole building of young men going about their daily business – cooking, talking with one another, the sounds of foreign soccer games being played and people watching it intensely.

“I can feel it,” Tebogo said. “I think the lights are coming on very soon. I can sense it. They are almost there.” We talked like soldiers waiting for the cannons to stop, or Italian immigrants waiting to see the Statue of Liberty from the deck of a foul smelling ship heading west – at least I imagine our conversation would have turned to something like that if we had been at this for days instead of hours. But now that they had abandoned the schedule and so far doubled the time that the lights were down, one couldn’t be certain what else Eskom would try to pull on us. There was little to do but wait, wait and guess when the lights would come back.

I stood and took in the last lights. Something about that balcony had always made me think of Kinshasa or Brazaville, though I’d never been to either place. Maybe it was just that it looked out and down onto rows of trees, so dense together it made it look like the Congolese jungle, or what I understood it to look like. The railings were all white painted metal, curved in ever so slightly and low enough that you could almost sit on it, like it had been built in an era that was modern but before safety regulations mattered enough to change the whims of architects building new cities to make the continent in their desired image. In any case, the balcony was so large – almost as much floor space as our restaurant-sized kitchen – that it only made sense in the heat, or during load sharing, in this narrow period of time when there was almost no light inside but a trickle out there. Now that it had rained, the cement floor was slick with water and it was a hazard to walk. The lights had been out for five hours at this point.

“Hey man, I saw you reading a book,” Tebogo said from inside the kitchen. “Can I see it?” I stepped inside and pulled the plain brown volume that I had been reading off the top of one of the shelves where I’d left it after my excursion that day and passed it to him.

“Is it a bible?” I rolled it over in his hand to show the spine, the only text on the outside. “Her-Zog,” he said, enunciating each syllable equally. He examined the outside, and flipped through the pages, slightly yellowed after four decades and countless checkouts from the university library. “This is a very old, old book,” he said.

“Yeah, about forty years.” The inside cover still displayed the old crest of the University of Natal, back when the building was segregated, when the TV lounge was probably a dining hall, where young white men ate and talked about rugby and black women came and cleaned afterwards.

“What is it about?”

“Do you have Saturday?” I asked. He went over to the kitchen locker where he kept most of his things and rummaged through a few volumes and items of clothing looking for the Ian McKewan novel I’d lent him a few days earlier, when he came to my room and asked plainly if I had anything for him to read. I’d taken it one from a backpackers in Johannesburg, and with nothing else to do waiting for my plane eight hours later, I read half of it in a few sittings. It was a good book, about life in London on the eve of the Iraq War. One of those hallmarks of “post 9/11 fiction”, as they say now, full of details of the intricacies of an ordinary day turned upside down by the echoes of far off world events brought uncomfortably close to home. Tebogo had taken to it vivaciously, speeding through the pages, recounting the scenes with me, asking questions during our encounters in the kitchen, but mostly just making comments of wonder and astonishment.

He pulled the book out and handed to me – the plastic covering had torn a little since I’d lent it to him. No matter. I hadn’t it put there and I had no use for it anyway. I flipped through the first pages and showed him the excerpt at the beginning of the book.

“For instance?" it said. "Well, for instance, what it means to be a man. In a city. In a century. In transition. in a mass. Transformed by science. Under organized power. Subject to tremendous controls. In a condition caused by mechanization. After the failure of radical hopes. In a society that was no community and devalued the person … There, Herzog, though Herzog, since you ask for the instance, is the way it runs.”

“Oh, I see. But this is a very new book,” he said, holding up Saturday.

“It’s a quote, an excerpt; it’s just something he put in because he thought it was relevant.”

“This guy? Her-Zog?”

“No, that’s the character it’s about; it’s by Saul Bellow, this guy.” I pointed to the byline.

“So, is he a real person?”

“Herzog? No, he’s made up.”

“And this guy?” He held up Saturday, juggling the two in his hands, a little confused between the two, “Made up, also? Neither of them are real?”

“They’re characters, but based on real life and real people, and on the authors themselves. I mean, they’re real in that sense.”

“Oh, ok, I see,” he turned his eyes back to the book. “Yes, yes, yes, yes.” His suspicions were correct, then, or at least he suggested that in his demeanor. He opened Herzog to the first page and stood there by the door in the last light and started reading to himself quietly, mumbling the words of the first passage. I went back outside and listened more to the sound of the rain of the prior hour finally making its return to the earth as it passed over the leaves and hit the ground from the trees. Now there were two sounds: one a quiet ocean that surrounded and the other a whisper from behind, and yet I still couldn’t get over how quiet it was – that whole building – the whole campus, really – sitting patiently in the dim light, waiting to be awakened again.

Swaziland 5-5

We had already had one three-day weekend. That was for Freedom Day, the anniversary of the first free elections in South Africa. I spent it going to the Chris Hani memorial lecture at Westville with Derek and his parents. It was a nice day, followed by another day off because all my classes then were cancelled, and then another day off, because I decided to sleep in that day.

By the end of it all, though, I turned around only to realize that everyone on my program and the spattering of foreigners who weren’t were all going somewhere for the next weekend, the four-day weekend at the end of that already shortened week. Most were going to the Drakensberg Mountains straddling the border between Free State and KwaZulu-Natal, and the mountain kingdom of Lesotho that lay within it. A few were going to Coffee Bay to the south. I made some excuses for myself, that I didn’t have the right clothes for Lesotho (it was snowing there by now) and that a weekend on the beach sounded nice but not exactly what I wanted. But behind it all I knew that I wanted to get out. I’d distanced myself from all of them and now, perhaps, I was paying the price. Whatever trip I was going on was going to be solo.

So I called A. Kay, having heard rumor that there was a combie one could catch in town that went all the way to Swaziland. It was better than Mozambique, which mean spending time in a city the size of but far dirtier and a little more dangerous than Durban, with all the beaches a little farther north than was easy to get to in the time I had, and it promised to be at least a little cheap. I decided I’d take my chances.

The next day, Thursday morning, A. Kay dropped me off at a non-descript black mini-bus with some people standing outside and a trailer hitched to the back. I asked the driver if it was going to Swaziland and he muttered that it was, so I gave him my passport, got on, found a seat in the back and paid R170 to his assistant.

The bus was already half full, and when it filled up we would leave.

Some girls were sitting in front of me.
“I’m hoping to meet the King of Swazi’s daughter – the princess” one said. She paused before the two broke into laughter. “She has a very, very pretty smile, but a naughty face for a princess. She says she says she likes to ‘play’ a lot.”

That was my first brush with the Swazis.

What did I know about this country, anyway? It was small and landlocked, like Lesotho, but not broke like Lesotho. In fact, by the standards of the neighborhood, it was a sort of Bahrain or Qatar – an emirate state – rich from natural endowment (sugar, in this case, not oil) and, having managed its wealth well, it now had a developed infrastructure, and a relatively well financed population. The roads there were said to be paved; the corruption said to be non-existent, and crime was almost an urban legend.

It was, in so many ways a model for the rest of the continent. And yet at the same time (and again like some obscure Gulf state) all the reins of power were placed squarely in the hands of a remote and archaic absolute monarchy, the last one in Africa: a middle-aged man with thirteen wives, more wealth than he knew what to do with, and more kids than were in my overcrowded trig class in high school.

Was it a land of contrasts? Well, that’s a clichéd statement. I didn’t care to pass any judgments in the four days that I would be there, and certainly not before I left South Africa. But I’d see what I could find. Maybe I’d get lucky and find a backpackers that cost less than R80 a night. Maybe I’d find one or two people to talk to.

“Howszit bru,” a young black kid with a beard and a green sweatshirt said to me on his way down the aisle.

“I’m good,” I said, trying to minimize the interaction. He sat down. A minute later he started talking again.

“Is this going to be your first time in Swaziland?” he asked. I told him it was. “Ah, well. You’re going to have a very special time, I can guarantee that. You’ll find the people are a lot more polite then they are in South Africa, very generous people, they’ll ask you how you are and they’ll want to show you around. And the country itself is very beautiful as well. But mostly it’s just that, it’s the people. They’re very polite, as I say.” His accent was slightly English, like he had lived part of his life abroad or had gone to an English school. Immediately I could tell that he held himself a step above most of his peers in the country. He had an education – that much was obvious – but aside from that, his dress was a little more Western, influenced more by the styles of London or the Northern suburbs of Jo’burg than the really local colors. He reminded me a little of that black kid with the slick smile and the expensive and extravagant red coat who I met at the sailing team event a few weeks back, and then at a party on campus some time later. Every place I mentioned I had traveled to he made some comment about how unimpressed he was when he went there. Tokyo was too big, the US to inconsistent between states and cities. What bugged him most of all, though, was Cape Town. “It just doesn’t hold a lot for the typical African,” he said, as if he could lay any claim to that title. When I asked how he had managed to globe trot so much when he seemed to resent the experience so much, he just shined a simple answer through the same smile he wore throughout the night: “You could say I’m ‘privileged.’”

But after a few minutes it seemed clear that this one was different. His demeanor was more friendly, and I could tell that he had more to say then just to lament certain places and talk about superficial things. I asked him what he was doing in Swaziland.

“Well, my mom’s up there,” he said. “My parents are separated, and I go to school in Pietermaritzburg, so I go up there from time to time to see her.” So now it was clear, then. He had a split identity. The people were rude in South Africa, sure, but he did more than just go to school there, he was of and from the place, or at least half of him was.

…

We drove for three hours before reaching the border, a line in the sand marked by a pair of different flag poles, two modest, one story government offices, some welcome signs, and a kiosk on the Swazi side – like any other I had been to thus far in Africa, except without the armed guards.

On the Swazi side we finally introduced ourselves to each other. “Tau,” he said.

“Can you say it?” I did, and he sounded a little impressed. “It’s only a couple of hours or so more,” he said back on the bus. I hadn’t known that, of course, nor did I know exactly where this bus was going, except that it was going to some point beyond the Swazi border, though that much had only been a guess until we actually crossed it.

I checked over my notes again. The place I had looked up in the LAN the night before was in a place called Malkerns, just west of Mbabane, the capital, but not the largest city.

“Where are we stopping?” I asked Tau.

“In Manzini,” he said.

“And where are you going?”

“To Mbabane.”

“I’ll just follow you then,” I said.

And I did.

When we got to the bus rank in Manzini it was pouring rain. Tau threw a hood on his head and started dodging around, as if he were unused to the weather. We found some shelter in an awning at the entrance of a small store, elevated a few feet above the ground at the edge of the rank and surveyed the scene. We found a perch behind some nut vendors and surveyed the scene. It was magnificent, exactly what one wants to see in Africa – the swirling combies, the women with boldly colored head wraps, selling nuts and clothes and DVD’s, the striking mountains in the distant background and tall grass plains before them with a market of international transit paved in red dirt at our feet. Completely unphased by the rain, the men kept rolling their just arrived busses into place, often with their own feet, finding some unique patch of dirt among the others to park before the next journey. Others just walked around and shouted the upcoming destinations for the unmarked vehicles just now about to leave, as loud as they could and as many times as possible in a single breath before repeating.

“MbabaneMbabaneMbabaneMbabane! MbabaneMbabaneMbabaneMbabane!”

“MaputoMaputoMaputoMaputo!

MaputoMaputoMaputoMaputo!”

And all of it was so ordinary, one day in the life like any other in Swaziland. As far as I could see, I was the only westerner: one visibly pleased and relatively pale face in an otherwise ambivalent crowd. It’s not to say I looked out of place, of course, though in this place of commerce and transit even Tau, for his Jeans and mid-range to expensive green hood looked just as out of place.

“Don’t worry, it should stop in a few minutes,” he said of the rain as we waited.

A few minutes later the rain fell back to a drizzle so light it was a shame to even call it rain. So his instincts were sharp. He clearly knew something more about the place than a Lonely Planet Travel Guide (had I had one) could have told me.

We stepped back onto the rank and found a combie to the capital. Tau switched the sim card in his phone to a Swazi number and called his mother. All I could pick up was “car” and “backpackers” – the rest was in Swati. “My mom says she’ll be back at the house in a little bit. Then we can take the car out and find you a place,” he said getting off the phone. It took two combie rides to get from the rank in Manzini to his mother’s house in the hills of Mbabane – the first and second biggest cities in Swaziland separated by a distance that covered almost a third of the country along its longest dimension. The whole journey took about twenty minutes. On the way we passed the national soccer stadium, and then, a little further, the small but growing Taiwanese development sector and the national university. Gradually, we ascended up the hills into Mbabane, and, turning the corner around a stout mountain pass the capital city revealed itself – like some little ski town in the off-season in Switzerland, just coyly nestled between two mountains inside a valley decked in green.

I had come with the impression that Swaziland was a warm place, which seemed reasonable given all that I knew about the place – that anti-malarials were recommended for the more rural parts of the country and that they grew sugar cane there, for instance. Yet coming into town I found myself huddling for warmth, clutching the sides of my rather thin rain coat and underneath that, the sweater which I had only worn because it was cold that morning in Durban. It was the only such thing I had, but I didn't worry. Not a bit.